How THC Utterly Transformed My Relationship With Alcohol
A veteran of the beer industry, Leigh Gall switched careers and realized alcohol was no longer serving her.
By Leigh Gall
Photo courtesy of Leigh Gall
The following is a guest post written by Leigh Gall, Founder of Make Bold LLC, focusing on THC and non-alcoholic beverage education and executive coaching. She is also co-Leader of Women in Hemp at the Hemp Beverage Alliance. Connect with Leigh on LinkedIn.
I have been alcohol-free for 7 months. No one asked me to stop drinking. But I kept striving to change my relationship with alcohol, and the striving got louder the older I got.
I didn't have what many would consider a problem with alcohol, the kind that wrecks relationships or keeps you from a productive life. Alcohol was not the bad guy. It didn't make me a bad person or make me do bad things. If anything, it was a blessing and a saving grace during that season of my life. But I did not like my relationship with it, because I knew I had a dependency I didn't want.
For years, alcohol did two jobs for me. It was my escape from the bombardment. And it was the mechanism I used to feel fully like myself, alive. Old Leigh was berated by inner critics constantly, and alcohol quieted them. It was the off switch at the end of a loud day, and it loosened me enough to feel like the version of me I wanted to be. For a long time, it did that job well.
“I landed a job in hemp THC beverage sales, and I was shocked to learn that drinkable cannabis was even a thing. I started drinking them, partly to know what I was selling and partly as an alternative for some of the occasions I would have reached for alcohol. ... At first, hemp beverages were more of a bandaid, and then an off ramp.”
I fell in love with beer while working in London, and I was lucky enough to turn that love into a career in the craft brewing industry. Drinking was part of the job, and when I was younger, that felt manageable. Beer showed up at every company event, business lunch, and entertainment opportunity, the way it does in plenty of industries. I never questioned it; everything around me was built so I wouldn't have to.
Then my late 30s arrived, and Covid with them. Before I noticed, I was drinking nightly and turning family outings into permission slips. Brunches, the arcade, brewery visits, afternoons by the pool — all of it a good enough excuse for a daytime drink. It never got out of hand, the way some stories go. But the 5 or 6 p.m. drink became as fixed as brushing my teeth, and passing it up kept getting harder. The job alcohol was doing hadn't changed, but the cost of it had. Anyone deep in mid-life can tell you hangovers take on a new shape and color than the ones from our youth. Headaches came quicker. Irritability moved in. Impatience never left.
Around that same time, in 2023, I landed a job in hemp THC beverage sales, and I was shocked to learn that drinkable cannabis was even a thing. I started drinking them, partly to know what I was selling and partly as an alternative for some of the occasions I would have reached for alcohol. The THC drinks were not an exact replacement. Alcohol and cannabis are not the same thing. Two different experiences, two different outcomes, and I still preferred the feeling of alcohol at the time. At first, hemp beverages were more of a bandaid, and then an off ramp.
Working in both industries taught me something about myself and about the water I had been swimming in. In the beer world, there was always a built-in excuse not to stop. I had a beer within reach for any second I wanted one, whether it was 5 p.m. or the middle of the afternoon walking customers around the brewery. I once heard an owner talk an employee out of Dry January with a single line: "You know you work for a brewery." He wasn't being cruel. He just could take alcohol or leave it, so he had no idea what it was like to be someone who couldn't.
Photo courtesy of Leigh Gall
In the cannabis world, I felt like part of a health movement, surrounded by people looking for alternatives and building solutions for the public. So many of them had already gone alcohol free or moved easily between cannabis and alcohol without it owning them. I felt real encouragement to take on breaks and non-drinking challenges. Suddenly I wasn't swimming upstream. The current was moving that way, and it pulled me along with it.
That work started small. I signed up for a 14-day challenge, my first deliberate break, and I let myself keep the THC drinks along the way. When I finished, the pride I felt was proof of something. I could do this. Dry January came next, and then the breaks became a habit of their own, scattered through the year, on purpose. Each one was more evidence, not just that I could live without alcohol, but that life was better on the other side of it. Clear mornings. Days I didn't lose to nursing a hangover. Grocery runs where I wasn't snapping at my kids in the aisle because I felt terrible, a feeling I had handed to myself.
“In the cannabis world, I felt like part of a health movement, surrounded by people looking for alternatives and building solutions for the public. So many of them had already gone alcohol free or moved easily between cannabis and alcohol without it owning them.”
While the breaks were key to my eventual abstention, the work underneath is what matters most. There is no way I would be here without the work I have done on myself that ran alongside those intentional breaks. Somewhere in there, I finally met my inner self. Not the polished one. The one underneath. I found the critics who had been berating me all day long, the bombardment I had been drinking to escape, the mental abuse I hadn't known to call by its name. I had never been aware of any of it, so of course I drank the way I did. Alcohol was self-medication for a wound I couldn't see.
Once I could see it, everything changed. Because alcohol's two jobs were to quiet the noise and hand me back to myself. The moment I learned to do those things on my own, the jobs were finished. I didn't have to white-knuckle my way past a drink anymore. I just stopped needing what it used to give me, because I learned how to do it myself.
That is why I do the work I do now. I help other people find the noise, the critics, and the thoughts we all carry, the same ones that send some of us to alcohol, some to overeating, and some to a life half-lived because we never took the shot we wanted. I know that noise. I don't fault my old self for a second. I am just grateful I finally saw her clearly.
My relationship with alcohol ended quietly on December 31, 2025. My husband and I were out at one of our favorite spots, and I ordered two beautiful grapefruit martinis over dinner, picture perfect in every sense. We finished dinner and drove home with Dry January waiting the next morning. As I set down that last martini, something in me already knew it would be my last. Not because I was forcing it. Because I didn't need it anymore. I haven't had a drink in the seven months since.
Do I still drink THC beverages? Heck yes. Maybe 10% of the time, if that. They let me be social, hold a drink in my hand, and catch a light buzz when the occasion calls for it. And the next morning, I wake up refreshed, clear headed, and fully like myself.
Which, it turns out, was the whole point. I didn't quit alcohol to prove I could go without it. I quit alcohol because I finally learned how to give myself the things I had been drinking to get.
